It’s early evening, and all three girls are in the kitchen getting dinner ready. I had a pretty good day, even considering that I tried to sabotage it by staying up too late last night. It wasn’t too bad, but it was enough to throw off my regular schedule. The good news is that we finally incentivized Younger to staying in her bed all night.
The trick was getting her to go to bed on her own. Normally she calls for her ‘five minutes’ with Missus, which usually turns into half an hour or more. I’ve been trying to stress to Missus to get her to stop laying in the bed until Younger falls asleep, but she hasn’t been doing that. So Younger is still so used to relying on Missus physical closeness to calm herself, and it leads to her waking up in the middle of the night and coming into our bedroom. Not last night. Younger went to sleep on her own, and we didn’t see her until about fifteen minutes before our alarms were to go off. She was bright and shiny.
We’ve been having some interesting special time lately, doing a lot of lifts, where I lay on my back and let the kids stand on my hands while I press them up like a bench press. It’s good for their balance, and my muscle control. Today we expanded it a bit and I finally got Younger to stand up on my shoulders. It’s actually quite a lot of pressure on my shoulders. I can’t imagine Elder standing up there. I’d like to keep practicing, to see if I could get Younger to climb up my torso, stand on my shoulders and onto my hands so I could press her up in the air, cheerleader style.
I finally got a copy of It Takes Two, a game about a divorcing couple who get turned into a couple of dolls by their young daughter and have to work together to get back to her. It’s a split screen game that requires that both players work together to solve various puzzles and challenges. It’s quite fun, although the cartoonish artwork is a bit at odds with some of the language in the game. We’re about a quarter of the way through it, and we’re enjoying it.
Work was ok today. Got some things done and started reading a PhD dissertation from one of the founders of Machinations. It’s about three hundred pages on emergent gameplay. I’ll have to add it to my texts on data-oriented design that I’m working through. Who knew that I’d be doing academic research as part of my job?